How to Be an Atheist (Foreword by J. P. Moreland): Why Many Skeptics Aren't Skeptical Enough by Mitch Stokes

Author:Mitch Stokes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: REL012000/REL067030/REL001000
ISBN: 9781433542985
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2016-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

246 Monton wrote his dissertation at Princeton under the great Bas van Fraassen.

247 Rodney D. Holder, “Quantum Theory and Theology,” in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, ed. Alan G. Padgett and J. B. Stump (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 229.

248 Bradley Monton, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009), 98.

249 Monton explains:

The Big Bang hypothesis holds that the universe, including space and time itself, came into existence a finite amount of time ago, and shortly after the universe came into existence it was in a state of large energy density, and the energy density in the various regions of the universe has been decreasing overall. General relativity has an infinite number of models of spacetime, and in some of the models there is a Big Bang, whereas in others there isn’t. Based on the empirical data we have about our universe, the models of general relativity that best describe our universe are models where there is a Big Bang.

Bradley Monton, “Prolegomena to Any Future Physics-Based Metaphysics,” in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, vol. 3, ed. Jonathan L. Kvanvig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 150.

Unfortunately the term “Big Bang” is ambiguous, as physicist Sean Carroll points out:

Confusingly, the phrase “Big Bang model” refers to the entire history of the expanding universe that began in a hot, dense state, whose broad outlines are established beyond reasonable doubt. In contrast, the “Big Bang event” is not really an event at all, but a placeholder for our lack of complete understanding.

Sean Carroll, “Does the Universe Need God?,” http://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/dtung/, also published in Padgett and Stump, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity.

250 “This can be thought of as counterfactual metaphysics: what metaphysical claims would be true, were general relativity true? . . . This would be an interesting and important philosophical result, but we have to recognize what the limitations of the result are” (Monton, “Prolegomena to Any Future Physics-Based Metaphysics,” 157).

251 Monton, Seeking God in Science, 116.

252 Of course if we were to be given some of the answers by, say, God, then we’d have back-of-the-book answers to the big questions. This is exactly what we Christians claim we have. Of course, we’re not the only ones.

253 Often, then, these arguments are taken to be in the form of an inference to the best explanation. But there are other possibilities, as Hume, for example, pointed out: they can also be reasonably thought of as arguments from analogy.

254 Brian R. Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 385.

255 Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 145.

256 See Aquinas’s comments, for example, in Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith to the Head: Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), 53.

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